The story at the heart of the new film NUREMBERG is an important one. It’s the little-known story of an army psychiatrist tasked with studying what was left of the Nazi high command after WWII ended to help the allies’ legal team prepare its prosecution of their war crimes. Writer/director James Vanderbilt’s undertaking of such material is a noble effort, connecting the dots from the resentment of a nation to its embrace of fascist leadership. Vanderbilt’s film is also distinguished by a terrific cast and top-notch production values. Unfortunately, his screenplay suffers from some significant missteps that keep the movie from being as effective as it should be. For starters, the script is way too on-the-nose with some of its symbolism, like in the very first scene where an American soldier urinates on a swastika. Additionally, the film suffers compared to far better efforts done before, be they documentaries, Oscar-winning films like JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG, or miniseries from half a century ago like QB VII, HOLOCAUST, and THE WINDS OF WAR. The movie also comes very close to employing an “all sides are corrupt” POV which diminishes the focus on the Nazi atrocities at the heart of this story.
Like some of the heavy-handed symbolism Vanderbilt leans into, he also relies heavily on screenwriting crutches to move the story along. Titles explaining updates, newsreel footage, even characters carrying a lot of expositional dialogue feel almost amateurish. When Judge Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) is introduced as the legal lead running the efforts to bring the Nazi strategy to light for all to see, a lot of his dialogue feels like a Wikipedia page. When main character U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) shows up, the army psychiatrist tasked with determining the Nazi leaders’ fitness for trial, he shows off a card trick that too blatantly foreshadows how he’ll use his powers of deception to get the prisoners to open up to him. And when Herman Goering (Russell Crowe), the Nazi second-in-command enters the film, his portly arrogance feels almost like that of a Bond villain. He should be terrifying, I grant you, but not so broadly painted.
Crowe and Malek go a long way to add nuance to their interactions beyond what’s in the script, but the film’s better scenes play within the ranks of the Allies. Old pros Shannon and John Slattery as Colonel Burton C. Andres bring strength and authority to every scene, even when they’re arguing tactics among themselves or belittling Kelley. Richard E. Grant may only have a handful of scenes to strut his stuff, but he’s mesmerizing as the wise and blunt British prosecutor Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe. His cross of Goering in the final moments in court is the absolute highlight of Vanderbilt’s film.
Like all historical dramas, this one does take plenty of liberties, from a judge throwing up in the courtroom, which never happened, to Jackson being wholly flustered by Goering, obviously pumped up for dramatic purposes here, but most of the film stays close to the record. Easily the most compelling and moving part of it all is when the prosecution shares the army home movies of the camps being liberated that showcased all the Nazi atrocities. Thousands upon thousands of dead bodies, scores of skeletal prisoners, bones and corpses of men, women and children crowding the incineration ovens and gas chambers – it easily produces the same effect of horror and disgust on a viewer today as it must have upon everyone in the courthouse in 1947. Scripted drama cannot hope to compete with the genuine record of Nazi horrors presented in all its inhumanity.
And because such visuals are completely overwhelming, they obliterate any of Vanderbilt’s efforts to potentially create some sympathy for Goering when he admonishes Kelley for America’s bombing of Japan. Of course, our nation’s use of atomic weaponry was horrendous, but there’s very little reason to invest in any of Goering’s contrarian thinking when he boldly hails Hitler under oath in court even after being shown the documented evidence of the Nazi horrors.
Perhaps Goering’s point about extreme measures being taken during war is meant to shame all such parties in conflict, but it works against the power of so much of what Vanderbilt sets up in the first two hours of his 158-minute saga. The importance of Kelley’s involvement was in identifying the overwhelming resentment that drove Hitler, Goering, et al. to forge a government built on retribution. Some more time understanding how that could be so easily peddled to the vast amounts of Germans in the 1930s, let alone similar countries in today’s time, would have made for a better film. At the very least, it would give this film some advantages over those previous efforts done in film and television for the past 80 years.
